Harvard University, Korea Institute – förlag

Early Korea is dedicated to developing the fields of early Korean history and archaeology in the English language. Volume Three features six articles written by Korean scholars who specialise in the subjects presented herein. The featured section includes three articles written on the Kaya polities in Korean history, with focuses on political history, historiography and scholarship, and archaeology. A fourth article introduces the Pokch’ŏn-dong cemetery in the Tongnae region of Pusan, an important site for understanding Kaya and its relations with Silla. Two other articles discuss various aspects of cultural resource management in Korea, the first treating cultural heritage management in South Korea over the past half century, and the second reviewing the important role played by institutes that specialise in archaeological excavation.

Early Korea is dedicated to developing the fields of early Korean history and archaeology in the English language. The present volume consists of six scholarly works by specialists active in these fields. Three studies focus on the topic of recent advances in historical archaeology on the Korean peninsula and adjacent regions and how this is changing the ways historians understand the history of the earliest states on the peninsula. Another study surveys the origins and development of ceramic traditions in Korea based on recently recovered archaeological data. Finally, two studies discuss the practice of heritage management in Korea, focusing on rescue archaeology and heritage protection.

Includes excerpts from a graphic novel by Guy Delisle and a comic book by Cho Pyong-kwon and Rim Walyong. This book also features photographs, poetry, and fiction.

Early Korea, a publication of the Early Korea Project at the Korea Institute, Harvard University, is a series designed to promote and develop studies of early Korean history and archaeology in the English language. While these fields are active and dynamic in East Asia, they are only beginning to develop in English-language scholarship. Early Korea/em> provides a forum for scholarly articles focused on studies of Korean history, archaeology, and art history prior to the tenth century. Each volume features a section dedicated to several articles focused on a selected theme, along with articles on timely issues in the fields of early Korean history and archaeology as well as studies on the academic fields themselves.The second volume, The Samhan Period in Korean History, features three articles examining historical developments and trade relations in the southern part of the Korean peninsula prior to the fourth century A.D., as well as a survey of historical sources available for the study of this period. Other articles present an annotated translation of primary source materials related to the study of the Samhan period and an overview of one of the important archaeological sites associated with Samhan society. The sixth article offers a look at the development of the field of art history in Korea through biographical treatments of two of its pioneers.

Volumes in the Early Korea Project Occasional Series focus on centralissues related to the study of early Korea history and archaeology. The present volume addresses several seminal questions associated with themiddle and late periods of the Silla kingdom (ca. 668-935): What was the composition of Silla's ruling elite? How did the state administer localareas? What was the relationship between the Buddhist church and thestate? How did the government evolve over the course of the middle andlate periods of Silla's rule? And what were the causes of Silla's demise?

How do writers make it new in their work? How do they find new readers, publishers, and in this new century, languages and audiences beyond the southern half of the Korean peninsula? Azalea has sought to embody and exemplify that quest, publishing the new work of today's Korean literary world, and seeking to make connections, to be a bridge to readers in the English language realms of North America and elsewhere.The current issue presents new writers of fiction and poetry through the work of several different translators. An interview with Gong Jiyoung offers the writer's views on the present-day Korean literary world. A Korean writer, to be sure, Gong has spent substantial intervals outside of Korea, and even in Korea, somewhat apart from the literary world. As she says, at least among women readers she is viewed as ""someone who used to be bound by the fetters conventionally applied to women in Korea, but who has shaken them off.""We also offer a special feature section on contemporary sijo poetry. The sijo poet Hong Sung-ran compiled for this issue a selection of fifty sijo poets, and several different translators have chosen poets to their various likings, and here offer their readings. To introduce the section and the idea of modern sijo, an essay presents the life work and the writings of Yi Pyonggi (1891-1968), whose 1932 newspaper article ""Let's Revitalize the Sijo"" might be read as a Korean response to Ezra Pound: ""Make it—the sijo—new!"" Special sections on the writers Yi Sang and Yi Kwang-su, landmark figures from the same Korean Modern period as Yi Pyonggi, explore how these seminal figures sought also to make literature new through their work in the literary world they both inhabited and distanced themselves from. Local, urban, dialect, foreign: these vectors of their literary universe still seem to mark the realms of contemporary Korean literature some ninety years later.

As becomes more and more apparent, Korea and Korean cultural and literary practices have been open and engaged for centuries. Korea was part of the complicated, dangerous, and demanding world during the Koryo dynasty when Mongol conquest or the threat of it had unfurled from Korea to Vienna. (And as they say still in Vienna, Wien bleibt Wien; Vienna stays Vienna.) Peter Lee in this issue presents an extraordinarily full account of the cultural context of the Koryo songs that have come down to us, through a variety of travelways, to register their voices from a time when even in Korea there was not a cell phone to be found anywhere.What was Korea, Japan, or life like in the twentieth century under Japanese colonial rule? John Frankl has been pursuing that and other questions in his studies and translations of the proto-modernist writer/artist/flâneur Yi Sang. There is something poignantly as well as literally expressive to be found in the scene when Yi Sang the essayist discounts all famous sites in the Japanese capital city as he stands taking a satisfying break at a public toilet. In an old story, a policeman whacks a fellow on the shoulder who was urinating against an alley wall, and points at the sign. “See that? Sobyon kumji! Urination forbidden!” The old fellow laughs and points, reading the sign in the opposite order: “Chigom pyonso: Right now, a toilet.” In the same earthy and direct manner, Yi Sang the writer, artist, and individual reversed the cultural readings of Korea’s colonized state.The present gathering also includes examples of contemporary Korean fiction and poetry, and the reincarnation of Kubo the Novelist from the widely known 1934 fictional work “A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist,” but in a new form and magazine medium as Kubo the Film Critic, a witty out-take on Korea’s current-day film culture.To be able to tell the story, and sing or say the poem, are signs of a culture’s freedom, even within the close confines of political or cultural norms imposed from outside. For all its didactic purposes, the example of “The Sky,” the 1937 children’s story by Hyon Tok, still gives us voices and events that in turn afford a palpable sense of the life of that time. Just as Peter Lee has done with the details of Koryo life and culture that frame the Koryo songs, this issue’s other stories and poems likewise give the reader a lively sense of Korea’s 20th and 21st century literature and culture.The astonishingly vivid images in Choi Ho-Cheol’s cartoons deserve their own eloquent praise. One might note the vivid detail, the extraordinary depth, the range and active participation in life by all the figures in the pictures, the sweep of the landscape, from house porch to landmark skyscraper, and suggest that the same range, the same array of vivid details, the same sense of an exuberantly vital cultural community are to be found in all the work of our current issue. We owe thanks to the managing editor for once again assembling such a repast, as well as to the writers, translators, artists, and other participants in this lively issue.

Azalea 6 gathers once again a remarkable range of poetry, fiction, memoir, and other materials. Heo Gyun was widely credited as the author of the well-known Robin Hood-like story, the ""€œTale of Hong Gildong.""€ Translator and copious annotator Minsoo Kang succinctly indicates the unlikelihood of that attribution, while also asserting another claim, the right to use the official ""€œKorean""€ romanization system for the Korean language rather than the McCune-Reischauer system preferred by this journal and many Western scholarly publications. An entirely fitting and apt move, Professor Kang'€™s hope to allow future generations of readers the right to choose is one that, for all the tension it may produce as readers make their way from one system to the other in our pages, Azalea is glad to endorse.From the seventeenth-or as Minsoo Kang argues, more likely the nineteenth-century story of Hong the bandit, readers can turn their attention to poetry, recollections, illustrations by Kim Young Jin, and a comics version of the story by Shun Dong Wu. Across a wide range of contemporary literature and other arts, a compelling array of works will make their own claims upon the reader's attention.

This volume, consisting of five chapters and an introduction, includes discussion of a variety of artworks, ranging from gold adornments found in Silla tombs to Kory? Buddhist paintings scattered in modern museum and private collections, that provide insight into the religious practices, aesthetics, cross-cultural exchanges, and everyday life of the people who made, used, appreciated, and circulated them. Based on thorough investigations of these artworks, their social context, and related texts, the five chapters in this book elucidate the cross-cultural interactions between the peoples and regions of Korea, China and South and Southeast Asia during the Silla to Kory? periods.

This volume, consisting of ten chapters and an introduction, treats that period of the history of the Korean peninsula characterized by the presence of commanderies first established by the Chinese Han empire in 108 B.C. The ten chapters of this volume address such topics as the societies that preceded the commanderies, the history and material culture of the commanderies, particularly of Lelang, the political and cultural influence the commanderies exerted upon surrounding regions, and the structural character of the commanderies in Korea viewed in broad perspective.

Editors Note: What a range of literary and visual work lies before you, O most fortunate readers of Azalea Volume Seven: poetry, prose, images! There is an extended conversational dialogue between the scholars and cultural theorists Kim Uchang and Karatani Kojin, as well as an excerpt from Korea’s first ancient novel, if the 17th century Kuunmong, Nine Cloud Dream counts as ancient, having appeared several decades before Daniel Defoe’s first Western novel, Robinson Crusoe. We also have contemporary fiction, poetry, and flash fiction; visual work, both apart from text as well as embedded in it, shaping it; and voices ranging from the Korean American writers gathered together by Heinz Insu Fenkl and Minsoo Kang, to a dog’s own words in the story “Frank & Jindori” by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee. Jack Saebyok Jung’s introduction and translation of Yi Sang’s (1910-1937) “Paradise Lost” prose/poems gives us yet another perspective on one of twentieth-century Korea’s most irreducibly modern writers. If all this were not enough, there is a section of, by, and pertaining to the undersigned, the journal’s Editor, with reflections of his own variously framed encounters over the decades with the people, culture, and literature of Korea.As some may have noted, Azalea does not pursue an established theory line; or I do not. In translating Korean poetry into English, I have been aware of the gravitational pull of the poem’s shape in the original language, and of my intent to remake the poem, like a clay pot, in the other, English. To push the metaphor just a bit, I do not seek to break the original poem down into its parts, into the clay bits or the glaze constituents, then reconstitute them all over here. I like to try to make another pot, just like the first one, that will hold an equal amount of interest, interpretive gesture, sense of volume, and space as the original.I might turn here to Robert Hass who, in his Foreword to Joseph Cadora’s new translation of Rilke’s New Poems from Copper Canyon Press, suggests that a translation may have a certain advantage over an original poem, as it reminds the reader that the “absolute poem” is always still out there.Over the years, each issue of Azalea has brought together a remarkably wide range of literary and visual artwork from “out there.” The International Communication Foundation (Seoul), has shared our vision for what translating and publishing Korean literature can accomplish. I note their support with gratitude. I note also with thanks the Korean Literature Translation Institute’s encouragement and financial support over the years, and with regret, the conclusion of that support with our previous issue, Volume Six.As we all go forward, I express the confident hope that many readers will enjoy the materials gathered in this issue. May teachers find examples of forms, voices, and subjects which they can use in their classrooms to bring students toward a deeper understanding and appreciation of Korean literature, from present-day to historical, and from what is made in Korea in the Korean language, all the way to works written in English in the U.S.May you feel inspired, as I have been, to follow the paths that open. - David R. McCann

Once again, readers will discover a rich and varied array of contemporary Korean literary and image work in the current issue of Azalea journal. We celebrate the 100th anniversary of the births of two of the twentieth century's great Korean writers, Midang Sŏ Chŏngju, the poet, and Hwang Sunwŏn, the short story and novel writer. Periodically, as the cultural, political, and historical tides in Korea have fallen and risen only to fall and rise again, these two writers have been lionized, denigrated, taken as emblems of Korea's literary capabilities and accomplishments, or set to the side as passé, out-of-sync, politically unacceptable, or just too old to matter. Yet readers will find a rich array of reflections on these two writers and examples of their literary accomplishments. May you savor and treasure. Let us resolve to keep these writers central to our understanding of the terrain that Korean literature traversed in the twentieth century and to comprehend how much it would lose if it did not value, even treasure, these and others in the twenty-first.Then we find writers who have taken the stage in the twentyfirst century, now already a century since Sŏ Chŏngju and Hwang Sunwŏn were born. Contemporary fiction from our featured writer, Lee Eyunkee, whose work gives a new, contemporary meaning to that term, is followed by the work of a series of poets and other fiction writers of today, as well as a nostalgic glance back at the twentieth-century poet Chŏng Chiyong.Readers are invited once again to savor the results of Chicago's Sejong Cultural Society's annual sijo-writing contest. Nearly one thousand entries came in, from all over. It is a pleasure to see the enthusiasm for the sijo growing among younger writers in their English-language practice of the form and to be able to make room for their works in our journal. One hundred years from now, may Korean poetry and fiction, graphic arts, photography, and yes, the sijo, be more widely known and ever more deeply appreciated.Finally, we are grateful for the encouragement and support that the International Communication Foundation has provided to Azalea's growth and vitality as a literary journal dedicated to these ends. Yet we join with the Foundation and with family members in sadness at the passing last year of Dr. Yeo Seok-ki, the Foundation's president. A dedicated visionary in seeking to encourage the wider and deeper appreciation of Korean literature, Dr. Yeo was also a nimble raconteur and conversationalist. I enjoyed the luncheon meetings that I was fortunate to have with him over the years, as well as the more formal communications regarding workshops and other program initiatives. He was always there, and he will be in our thoughts, memories, and hearts." - David R. McCann April, 2015, in Watertown

This volume contains twelve studies on the history and archaeology of the Kogury? kingdom, which existed from the first century B.C. to 668, its territories encompassing the northern part of the Korean peninsula and much of southern Manchuria. The studies presented here were written by specialists in various disciplines, covering issues in Kogury?’s political history, its archaeological remains, its mortuary system and tomb art, and its place in historiography.

Once again, readers will discover a rich and varied array of contemporary Korean literary and image work in the current issue of Azalea journal. We celebrate the 100th anniversary of the births of two of the twentieth century’s great Korean writers, Midang Sŏ Chŏngju, the poet, and Hwang Sunwŏn, the short story and novelwriter. Periodically, as the cultural, political, and historical tides in Korea have fallen and risen only to fall and rise again, these two writers have been lionized, denigrated, taken as emblems of Korea’s literary capabilities and accomplishments, or set to the side as passé, out-of-sync, politically unacceptable, or just too old to matter. Yet readers will find a rich array of reflections on these two writers and examples of their literary accomplishments. May you savor and treasure. Let us resolve to keep these writers central to our understanding of the terrain that Korean literature traversed in the twentieth century and to comprehend how much it would lose if it did not value, even treasure, these and others in the twenty-first.Then we find writers who have taken the stage in the twentyfirst century, now already a century since Sŏ Chŏngju and Hwang Sunwŏn were born. Contemporary fiction from our featured writer, Lee Eyunkee, whose work gives a new, contemporary meaning to that term, is followed by the work of a series of poets and otherfiction writers of today, as well as a nostalgic glance back at the twentieth-century poet Chŏng Chiyong.Readers are invited once again to savor the results of Chicago’s Sejong Cultural Society’s annual sijo-writing contest. Nearly one thousand entries came in, from all over. It is a pleasure to see the enthusiasm for the sijo growing among younger writers in their English-language practice of the form and to be able to make roomfor their works in our journal. One hundred years from now, may Korean poetry and fiction, graphic arts, photography, and yes, the sijo, be more widely known and ever more deeply appreciated.Finally, we are grateful for the encouragement and support that the International Communication Foundation has provided to Azalea’s growth and vitality as a literary journal dedicated to these ends. Yet we join with the Foundation and with family members in sadness at the passing last year of Dr. Yeo Seok-ki, the Foundation’spresident. A dedicated visionary in seeking to encourage the wider and deeper appreciation of Korean literature, Dr. Yeo was also a nimble raconteur and conversationalist. I enjoyed the luncheon meetings that I was fortunate to have with him over the years, as well as the more formal communications regarding workshops and other program initiatives. He was always there, and he will be—in our thoughts, memories, and hearts.